To David Parker, a good neighbor
Mazeppa is a community on the border of Rowan and Iredell Counties, North Carolina, about 5 miles north-east of Mooresville, N.C. It is part of a now defunct Barringers Township.
I had been researching and hypothesizing the origin of Mazeppa for over two years when I ran into Charles Davis, a community resident who shed some light how the community got its name. His father, Marvin Lee Davis, told him that the men who laid the railroad track several years before Marvin’s birth in 1903, named the train stop.
Indeed, the North Carolina Midland Railroad opened the line from Mocksville to Mooresville (27.47 miles) in 1899. (1) It was “an area of rolling terrain sprinkled with generational family farms. No rail shippers were located here even in past decades; hence, its only importance was as a flag passenger train stop as needed.”(2)
On May 15, 1899 an application to open a post office that would be called Mazeppa was submitted to the United States Post Office Department. The request was granted. The post office opened on February 15, 1900 in a community of Pine Valley. (3) Margaret Brown was appointed the postmaster. (4) Mazeppa appears on the 1901 postal route map. (5)
J’ay vu un temps où vous n’aimiez guères
l’histoire. Ce n’est après tout qu’un ramas de
tracasseries qu’on fait aux morts…
(“…history
is, after all, nothing but the pack of tricks that
the living play on the dead.”)
Voltaire,
Letter of February 9, 1757, to Pierre Robert Le Cornier de Cideville
Ivan Mazepa
Unknown artist, 18th c.
Dnipro Museum of Art
No confirmed portraits of
Mazepa survive from his own time, since
in 1709, Tsar Peter ordered that they all be
destroyed.
To a Ukrainian toponym Mazeppa evokes the memory of the17-th century national hero, hetman of the Zhaporizhian Host Ivan Mazepa – a statesman of noble Ruthenian origin, military commander, diplomat, patron of faith (Eastern Orthodoxy), science, education, and arts, poet, and bibliophile. (6) His contemporaries and modern Ukrainians regard him as a national hero who fought for the independence of what would become the Ukrainian State. Russian neighbors consider him a traitor (he was not) for breaking away from the alliance with Russia during the Great Northern War (1700-1721) between the Tsardom of Muscovy and the Swedish Empire.
It may be tempting to connect the unusual toponym to the most famous Ukrainian. Yet questions remain how and why did a Ukrainian statesman become an inspiration for a tiny community in North Carolina in the late 19th century? What was the significance of Mazepa to the men who named the train station? What was their connection to the name Mazepa? What meaning did it hold for them? The story of toponym Mazeppa, N.C. is more complex and less straightforward than meets the eye. It is a culmination of history and legend, fact and imagination, politics and passion, certainty and ambiguity. Ultimately the toponym is about the histories of many people converging right here in our neck of the woods.
Following the pattern of place naming in North America and taking into consideration settlement patterns of people in late 1800’s in North Carolina who were likely to make up local workforce, it is unlikely that the men who named a local train station had any connection to Ukraine or were immigrants from Ukraine.(7) The main giveaway that gives weight to this deliberation is the spelling – Mazeppa (misspelled name), not Mazepa (correct Ukrainian spelling). It leads me to think that the connection to the historical figure of Ivan Mazepa was likely indirect. How could Mazeppa make his presence known in Iredell/Rowan counties of North Carolina in1890’s?
Ivan Stepanovych Mazepa was born on March 20, 1639 at the ancestral seat of the Mazepas, Kamyanets, a small settlement on the left bank of Kam’yanka River, 14 mi north-west of Biała Cerkiew (Pol.White Church, Ukr.Bila Tserkva), a castle town on the Ros River in Rzeczpospolita, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a union of the Crown of the Polish Kingdom and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
Ivan Mazepa’s father, Stefan Adam Mazepa (Ukr. Stepan Adamovych Mazepa), was a Ruthenian nobleman in the service of the Polish King. He took part in the 1648–57 Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky against the Polish crown which led to the creation of Zaporizhian Host. Zaporizhian Host in Ukrainian meant the “army of the Beyond the Rapids”. It was a democratic, self-governing, semi-military state rules by the General Cossack (Military) Council, while the office of head of state was presided by the military commander called Hetman. Ivan Mazepa’s mother, Maryna Makievska, was of noble Orthodox origin, an educated and literate woman, who later became her son’s trusted political advisor.
In 1650’s Ivan Mazepa attended Kyiv Academy (now Kyiv-Mohyla Academy) that was fashioned after Jesuit system of education grounded in faith in God (unofficial Jesuit motto was Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam (“For the greater glory of God”) and classical education tradition of studying ancient languages and Ancient Greek, Roman, and Renaissance authors. In late 1650’s Ivan Mazepa was sent to study in the West – Holland, Germany, Italy, and France.
Political turmoil between the Grand Principality of Rus and Muscovy promoted Stepan Mazepa to send his son to the court of the Polish King Jan II Kazimierz where Ivan became an equivalent of a gentleman of the bedchamber of the Polish King, a noble title that indicated access to the king’s living quarters and the king himself. It was not unusual for the sons of the Ruthenian Cossack elite to send their sons to round off their education at the Polish King’s Court. There were two episodes of Mazepa’s life at the court that were recorded in history, altercations with a Polish nobleman Jan Pasek and a 1663 mission to Hetman of Right-Bank Ukraine on behalf of the Polish King. An anecdote as retold by Pasek of an adulterous affair of Ivan Mazepa with a wife of a Polish nobleman propelled him into fame. The mission on behalf of the king could serve as an indirect proof that the story was untrue and made-up. (9)
Lord Byron’s Poem
“‘Bring forth the horse!’ The horse was brought;
In truth, he was a noble Steed,
A Tartar of the Ukraine breed,
Who looked as though the Speed of thought
Were in his limbs – but he was wild,
Wild as the wild-deer, and untaught,
With spur and bridle undefiled;
’Twas but a day he had been caught,
And snorting with erected mane
And strugging fiercely but in vain,
In the full foam of wrath and dread,
To me the Desart-born was led. –
They bound me on, that menial throng,
Upon his back with many a thong,
Then loosed him with a sudden lash –
Away! – Away! – and on we dash! –
Torrents less rapid and less rash. (8)
Lord Byron immortalized Ivan Mazepa in his narrative Romantic poem Mazeppa published in London in 1819. Mazeppa was a misspelling of Mazepa. Byron drew his inspiration from the legend about young Mazepa as told by a French historian and philosopher François-Marie Arouet Voltaire in his 1731 History of Charles XII, King of Sweden. (10) Voltaire penned the following words which were to make a great impression on the European reading public with important consequences for the history of literature and art:
“This Place was then filled by a Polish gentleman, named Mazeppa, born in the Palatinate of Podolia. He had been brought up a page to King John Casimir, and had received some tincture of learning in his court. And intrigue he had in his youth with the lady of a Polish gentleman being discovered, the husband caused him to be whipped, and then tied naked upon a wild horse, and sent to ramble in that condition. The horse, which had been brought out of Ukrania, returned into its own countrey, and carried Mazeppa with him half killed with hunger and fatigue. Some of the countrey people gave him relief, and he lived a long time among them, and signilized himself in several attempts against the Tartars. The superiority of his understanding made him very considerable among the Cosaques, and his reputation daily increasing obliged the Czar to make him Prince of Ukrania.”
In reading Voltaire’s account of Mazepa and early eighteenth century Ukraine, the
questions immediately arise: what were his sources for this exciting story and to what degree does it accord with historical fact? Firstly, it must be said that Voltaire never visited Sweden, the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or the Russian Empire, let alone Ukraine, and therefore he derived his knowledge of them from reading and from interviews and correspondence with
others who were more directly acquainted with these areas; that is, Voltaire wrote as an analytic
historian (a “philosophical” historian, as he would have it) and not an eyewitness of the events he described, though these events occurred during his own lifetime, that is, just a few decades before he took up his pen on the subject; thus there were still many participants in these events still alive.
Voltaire clearly stated that he based his work on several personal accounts of people who had spent several years with either Charles or Peter, but he did not name these persons; in later editions (in response to certain critics) he actually named several Frenchmen and others who had been with Charles in Turkey, and he also named Count Stanisław Poniatowski (1676-1762), a Pole who had been with Charles at Poltava and later lived in exile in western Europe.
The story seems to have originated in the memoirs of the abovementioned Jan Chryzotom Pasek (1636-1701), a Polish nobleman from Mazuria, who, like Ivan Mazepa, was a page at the court of the Polish king Jan Kazimierz. In 1661, Pasek seemed to have maintained secret relations of some sort with some rebels, or “confederates” as they were called at the time, who opposed his patron, the King. As a loyal servant of the King, Mazepa reported this to his sovereign. As a result, Pasek, who was exonerated after an inquiry, turned against Mazepa and, later on, gleefully related the story of Mazepa’s humiliating ride in his memoirs. Pasek, who may have simply taken his “Ride” theme from classical Latin literature, in particular Seneca’s Phaedra, which had recently been translated into Polish and printed in Poland, actually gives this humiliation as the reason why Mazepa deserted the king’s service for life with the Ukrainian Cossacks. The same story, with some added details, is told by another early eighteenth century Polish author, Franciszek Otwinowski (d. 1745), who recounted it in his Dziejów Polski pod panowaniem Augusta II (History of Poland under the Rule of Augustus II). Neither Pasek’s memoirs nor Otwinowski’s history were printed in the eighteenth century, but both, especially the former, circulated in manuscript and Pasek’s, at least, was probably well known to Poles living in exile in France, like Poniatowski. Voltaire picked up the story from Poniatowski and perhaps also from some other third hand source. (11, 12)
To this day Ivan Mazepa has a reputation of having been a Don Juan of his age, however, historians who research his personality disagree if there is any truth to the mythology of Mazepa and women. The story of the adulterous affair and the subsequent horse ride was unlikely to have taken place based on the timing of the Pasek’s writings (some thirty years after the events took place, the manner of writing that indicates a spoken anecdote rather than recounting of historical events, as well as the status Mazepa maintained at the court after the supposed shameful expulsion from the court took place).
Did the men who worked on the railroad read Lord Byron? I find it doubtful but who knows. I did not find any evidence that Mazeppa was a significant cultural influence in North Carolina in the 19th century. There had to be some other connection.
Adah Isaacs Menken’s Burlesque
On September 17, 1863 the Territorial Enterprise, a newspaper published in Virginia City, Nevada published a letter from Mark Twain “The Menken – Written especially for Gentlemen“. (13)
When I arrived in San Francisco, I found there was no one in town – at least there was nobody in town but “The Menken” – or rather, that no one was being talked about except that manly young female. I went to see her play “Mazeppa”, of course. They said she was dressed from head to foot in flesh-colored “tights”, but I had no opera glass, and couldn’t see it, to use the language of the inelegant rabble. She appeared to me to have but one garment on – a thin tight linen one, of unimportant dimensions; I forget the name of the article, but it is indispensable to infants of tender age – I suppose any young mother can tell you what it is, if you have the moral courage to ask the question. With the exception of this superfluous rag, the Menken dresses like the Greek Slave; but some of her postures are not so modest as the suggestive attitude of the latter. She is a finely formed woman down to her knees; if she could be herself that far, and Mrs.H.A.Perry the rest of the way, she would pass for an unexceptional Venus. Here every tongue sings the praises of her matchless grace, her supple gestures, her charming attitudes. Well, possibly, these tongues are right. In the first set, she rushes on stage, and goes cavorting after “Olinska”, she bends herself back like a bow; she pitches headforemost at the atmosphere like a battering ram; she works her arms, and her legs, and her whole body like a dancing jack: her every movement is as quick as thought; in a word, without any apparent reason for it, she carries on like a lunatic from the beginning of an act to the end of it. At other times she “wallops” herself down on the stage, and rolls over as does the sportive pack mule after his burden is removed. If this be grace then Menken is eminently graceful.
Who was this Menken that incited such scorching review from Mark Twain? Adah Menken was a notoriously famous actress , a Civil War pinup of fighting men, North and South. Her claim to fame was acting the role of Mazeppa in the equestrian burlesque melodrama Mazeppa (1861-66), a role that saw her wearing flesh-colored tights whilst riding across the stage strapped to a horse. (14) It was a double scandal – a woman cross-dressing as a man and the risqué costume revealing her physique and suggesting nudity at the time when women hardly revealed any skin for modesty reasons.
Did any of the men who names the train station attend theater? Who knows! I consulted Robert C. Allen, a Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on the subject of possible availability of Mazeppa in North Carolina. His answer was that “North Carolina was a theatrical wilderness throughout the 19th century, and Charlotte would have been the nearest city with regular theatrical performances.” It is further unlikely that men who were involved in manual labor attended theater, unless, they were engineers, perhaps. It is plausible that men who returned from the Civil War were aware of Menken the Mazeppa pinup. We will never know for sure.
Mazeppa was named by men who laid railroad tracks. It is indirectly named after Ivan Mazepa, a Ruthenian nobleman and a Ukrainian Hetman in the late 17th-early 18th centuries. The name could emerge in rural Piedmont North Carolina via American Civil War era burlesque show star Adah Isaaks Menken who cross-dressed as Mazeppa. The original plot for the story came via Lord Byron’s poem Mazeppa that retold a likely untrue historical anecdote of Ivan Mazepa’s affair with a Polish noblewoman, whose husband punished him by stripping and whipping him, then tying him to a horse and sending him home to Ukraine.
Notes
1. Lewis, J.D. North Carolina Railroads – North Carolina Midland Railroad.
2. Robie, Dan. NS “L” Line – Winston-Salem to Mooresville. West Virginia and North Carolina Rails. https://www.wvncrails.org/
3. Vlasenko-Bojcun, Anna. (1984). Onomastic Works, p. 34. Ukrainian Free University: Munich-Denver-Miami Beach. Accessed November 23, 2019
4. Margaret M. Cornelius Brown (1880-1949) the wife of George Masters Brown (1866-1936) seems to be the right fit based on the listing of people.
5. North Carolina Maps. Post route map of the states of North Carolina and South Carolina showing post offices with the intermediate distances and mail routes in operation on the 1st of June 1901
6. Hetman is Ukrainian word for head-man, head of state. Zaporizhian Host was Ukrainian Cossack state. The cossacks were are a group of predominantly East Slavic Orthodox Christian people who became known as members of democratic, self-governing, semi-military communities originating in the steppes of Eastern Europe. Many of the people residing in these territories were called Ruthenians, who became known as Belarusians and Ukrainians after the rise of modern nation states. For more context, refer to Ivan Mazepa.
7. Vlasenko-Bojcun, Anna. (1984). The toponym Mazepa in North America. in Onomastic Works, p. 65-66. Ukrainian Free University: Munich-Denver-Miami Beach. Accessed November 23, 2019
8. Cochran, Peter. Lord Byron: Mazeppa.
9. Tairova-Iakovleva,Tatiana. Mazepa. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2007.
10. Voltaire. The History of Charles XII, King of Sweden. Alexander Lyon, 1732.
11. Prymak, Thomas. Voltaire on Mazepa and Early Eighteenth Century Ukraine.
12. Koropekyi, Roman. The Slap, the Feral Child, and the Steed: Pasek Settles Accounts with Mazepa. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 14, no. 3/4, 1990, pp. 415–26. JSTOR,
13. University of California Berkley. Mark Twain reviews Adah Isaacs Menken in Mazeppa. Mark Twain in the West.
14. Foster, Michael; Foster, Barbara. A Dangerous Woman: The Life, Loves, and Scandals of Adah Isaacs Menken, 1835-1868, America’s Original Superstar. Lyons Press, 2011.
Mount Ulla Historian 